The Council
The Council is an organization of sentient, spacefaring species who coordinate interspecies diplomacy and preserve galactic security. They were founded to defend the galaxy against the threat of Leviathan, a giant species of alien that apparently subsists by consuming stars and indirectly destroying all life on any planets orbiting their chosen prey. The core of the Council is made up of delegates from the twelve species who initially founded the Council in order to save their home systems from destruction. Ranking below the Twelve are delegates from numerous other species who participate in diplomatic discussions and trade with other Council species. Any sentient, spacefaring species may send a delegation to the Council; the Council respects the sovereignty of its member species to select their own delegates without the Council's input. The official Council date system measures time in galactic standard years from the Council's creation. Therefore the Council was created in Year Zero and the first confirmed Leviathan attack on an inhabited star system took place in Year -7. Station Zero The Council resides on an enormous space station which spends one year at a time orbiting each of the homeworlds of the Twelve. The station is maintained by an AI housed in a central supercomputer. This AI, known as the Custodian, performs all of the tasks that are necessary for Station Zero to function. This includes scanning new species arriving on the station and creating livable environments for them, station defense in the event of an attack, and production of service drones for station repair and personal assistance, Leviathan Event System The Council handles Leviathan threats based on an event-ranking system, escalating from Level One, events that pose little to no risk to sentient life, to Level Five, events that pose an extreme destructive threat to sentient life everywhere. * Level One Event: Confirmed Leviathan presence in an uninhabited star system (no sentient life). * Level Two Event: Confirmed Leviathan presence in an inhabited star system (sentient life forms present). * Level Three Event: Confirmed Leviathan presence in a star system inhabited by a spacefaring species or Council species. * Level Four Event: Confirmed Leviathan attack on a planet or space station. * Level Five Event: Confirmed organized hostile action by two or more Leviathan against one or more sentient species. The first confirmed Level Two event, the destruction of Eden by a single Leviathan, led to the creation of the Council. Until Year 202, Levels Four and Five had remained as hypothetical scenarios, since all confirmed events had been classified as Level Three or lower. Leviathan attack on Station Zero In Year 202, the Custodian went temporarily offline for a period of 2.4 hours. Due to backup life support systems, no lives were lost on the station during this event. At the time, the station was orbiting Rakshash, homeworld of the Asura, in the Ravanna system. During the outage, eyewitnesses near viewports reported sighting an immense object traveling toward the station through space, from the direction of Ravanna. The object was confirmed by Council officials as a Leviathan. The official record of the event states that a team of expert AI technicians from several different Council species were able to bring the Custodian back online in time to activate the station's defense systems, successfully repelling the Leviathan and causing it to flee into deep space. However, there were several contradictory reports stating that the defense system was never actually activated, and the Leviathan left of its own accord. The reasons for the station outage and the first-ever Leviathan attack on a galactic body other than a star are still unknown. The event was classified by the Council as the first-ever confirmed Level Four Leviathan Event. On a somewhat unrelated note, the event occurred mere hours after the arrival of a new ambassador on the station.